II
Five days later a giant of a man and a round thing that rolled straight as a warlance beside him clambered up the sloping black rock side of the Mountains of Eternity.
Sunlight glinted from the smooth, dark stone that was polished bright as a mirror by the myriad dust storms that swept up from the desert, year after year. Heat shimmered all about them, rising slowly from the vast sand-bottom, reflected back from the igneous rock. Sweat wetted the hairs on the man's chest and forearms. It dripped from his face in tiny streams.
Kortha stood erect on a narrow footpath and looked above him. Upward the trail wound to dizzy heights. Set on a shelf of massy ebon stone beyond him lay Yassa, like a white bowl of cool water in a black furnace.
Onward they climbed, and upward, their eyes fastened on the goal ahead of them.
They came together to the greenish bronze gates that tilted off their hinges and lay at grotesque angles. Down the street that stretched behind the gates walked Kortha, and with him swept the tumblie.
Kortha stood still, nostrils distended.
"I smell danger."
Eyes alert, he walked on; but now he paced like the stalking cat, and the muscles in his long legs humped and swelled beneath the bronzed skin. His hammer hung loose in his hand, but then, the claws of a tiger are often sheathed.